I tweeted about this, but figured it deserve a more lasting treatment.

If you've ever used Range#min or Range#max you may have inadvertently slowed your code significantly.

Both of those ought to be O(1) - constant time. After all, a Range in Ruby consist of two values, and though you can't be assured whether or not the first one or the last one is the smallest/biggest one, the obvious implementation is this:

    def min
      first <= last ? first : last
    end

.. and the equivalent one for Range#max. Except that's not what happens, as you can easily convince yourself by doing:

    $ irb
    irb(main):001:0> (1..10000000).max
    => 10000000
    irb(main):002:0>

... and see how slow it is. Eww. The explanation is that min/max are only provided in generic versions that iterate over the full Range (so that the same implementation also works on other collections).

If your app, like mine, frequently needs the smallest or greatest value in a Range, it may be time to monkey patch:

    class Range
      def min
        first <= last ? first : last
      end
      def max
        first >= last ? first : last
      end
    end

For the app that made me notice this problem, adding the above monkey patch caused a 30% speedup. Of course, if most of your ranges are small, or you don't use Range#min or Range#max anywhere, you may not notice any difference at all.

This is part of a series I started in March 2008 - you may want to go back and look at older parts if you're new to this series.

I've been lazy lately... Well, not really, I've been extremely busy, but I ought to have fit this in earlier. It's gotten harder and harder to get done too, since it's now more work since I had to go back and figure out a lot of the reasons for what I'd done.

Anyway, finally a new part, though short.

Down the rabbit hole: attr_(reader|writer|accessor)

Adding attr_reader / "attr_writer" / "attr_accessor" Should be easy, right? After all, all they do is allow read/write or both of member variables.

Trouble is you can't know that in advance.

    class Class
      def attr_reader foo
        puts "Hah!"
      end
    end
    class Foo
      attr_reader :bar
    end
    foo = Foo.new
    p foo.bar

Ouch. This is part of what makes Ruby exceptionally painful to compile.

It doesn't mean we can't make some assumptions, though, as long as we can handle the worst case where someone does something stupid (later we may want to add an option to make it assume you're not being stupid, and enable additional optimizations).

So how do we do this then?

Well, the obvious answer is to implement it in Ruby. Here are naive initial implementations (that only handle a single symbol, not an array like the real thing):

    def attr_accessor sym
      attr_reader sym
      attr_writer sym
    end
    def attr_reader sym
      define_method sym do
         %s(ivar self sym)
      end
    end
    def attr_writer sym
      define_method "#{sym.to_s}=".to_sym do |val|
        %s(assign (ivar self sym) val)
      end
    end

Note the s-expressions that rely on a new "ivar" primitive (that's not been added yet). That part is simple enough to add, but what else does the above require to be added to the compiler?

That's the ugly part. Here's a (possibly incomplete) list:

• define_method
• Real Symbol class
• Symbol#to_s
• Real String class
• String.to_sym
• Indirectly the :lambda s-expression construct needs to have support for variables

This is part of the reason I picked attr_* as the next thing to implement: It's an important, frequently used piece of functionality that snowballs and help drive implementation of functionality that is actually likely to be used.

Baby steps

First take a look at this commit

This is one of our assumptions (in between some other cruft): If you use attr_accessor etc., you are likely to need a vtable entry for that method.

Remember, we still don't implement a proper "fallback" in the form of a hash table for cases where the vtable gets "too big" (whatever we decide too big is) so for now we need this, but even later it'll be a useful optimization for many cases.

Worst case? We waste a vtable slot.

Next is where we actually add the basic implementations shown above, plus some debug statements, and stub for "define_method".

The comments bring us to an important question:

To type-tag or not to type-tag?

In MRI Symbol objects are "type tagged" integers. That is, they are not real objects at all, rather each symbol is represented by a specific 32 bit value, and those values can be identified as symbols by looking for a specific bit-pattern in the least significant byte.

This has the advantage of saving space - no actual instances need to be constructed. In this instance, however, it creates a lot of complication, by requiring the type tags to be checked on each and every method call.

For this reason we will, at least for now, avoid it.

(For Fixnum we will run into this problem again, and it will be even more tricky - for Symbol the number of objects can be expected to be reasonably small, but what about Fixnum? Ugh... Lets think about that later)

Instead we will keep a hash table of allocated symbols, which we will use to return the same object for the same symbol literal

I'm going to skip over most of the commits here, and show you the current state of the Symbol class and its associated compiler changes, since I must admit my commits have been quite messy and all over the place while putting in place these changes, and it's not very condusive to explaining the actual changes.

    class Symbol
      # Using class instance var instead of class var
      # because the latter is not properly implemented yet,
      # though in this case it may not make a difference
      #  @symbols = {} # FIXME: Adding values to a class ivar like this is broken
      # FIXME: Should be private, but we don't support that yet
      def initialize(name)
        @name = name
      end
      def to_s
        @name
      end
      # FIXME
      # The compiler should turn ":foo" into Symbol.__get_symbol("foo").
      # Alternatively, the compiler can do this _once_ at the start for 
      # any symbol encountered in the source text, and store the result.
    #  def self.__get_symbol(name)
    #    Symbol.new(name)       
    #    sym = @symbols[name]  
    #    if !sym               
    #      sym = Symbol.new(name)
    #    end
    #    sym
    #  end
    end
    def __get_symbol(name)
      Symbol.new(name)
    end

Uh, yes. I started out with actually having it turn symbols from text into an object at runtime, but I quickly realized this makes no sense for the case where a literal symbol is present in the program.

Note that we still need a proper Symbol#__get_symbol as commented out here later, because it is necessary to handle things like String#to_sym. However for now I've skipped it for a simple reason:

It requires implementing a hash table. It's not that hash tables are hard. But currently implementing Hash in pure Ruby likely will require features that are not in place yet... So, lets sort out the literal Symbols first, and then work our way up.

The trivial version above is well and good, but we need to make the compiler call __get_symbol..

So we replace Compiler#intern with this:

    # Allocate a symbol
    def intern(scope,sym)
      # FIXME: Do this once, and add an :assign to a global var, and use that for any
      # later static occurrences of symbols.
      args = get_arg(scope,sym.to_s.rest)
      get_arg(scope,[:sexp,[:call,:__get_symbol, sym.to_s]])
    end

As you can see from my comment, it really makes no sense to call __get_symbol over and over - it's inefficient. But it works for now. We'll go back and fix that later.

Also note that this doesn't exactly match the above commit, but also incorporate a change from a later commit: We do [:sexp ..] there because :sexp nodes don't get rewritten to a :callm, and __get_symbol here is indeed a function not a method (this distinction doesn't really exist in Ruby, but it exist at the implementation level in our compiler, because it eases interoperability with C - this may change whenever I get to the point where it makes sense to implement FFI support)

The other changes are simply there to reflect the fact that intern now returns the result of a get_arg instead of some arbitrary integer:

    -      return [:int,intern(name.rest)] if name[0] == ?:
    +      return intern(scope,name.rest) if name[0] == ?:

That's it for now, folks

I promise it won't be nearly as long to the next part. I need to untangle my changes for splat operator support, method_missing debug improvements, and work on the Array and String classes. I'll likely give each one of them a short part each before I get fully "back on track" - I intend to write the future parts in parallel with actually making the code changes.

You may or may not have seen my recent post where I admitted to more or less having decided to make my compiler project a Ruby compiler. On the downside this means a lot of complexity that may make it harder to follow. On the upside... Well, you get to read about a compiler for a "real" language as opposed to a toy, and hopefully the result will be usable and I'll manage to contain myself and not go off on wild tangents (I have a long list of experiments I want to do)

Since the last part things have moved quite far, and I'm not going to do a "patch by patch" overview of what's happened since. Instead I will this time give a rough overview of the state of the compiler as of starting to write this - April 25th (slightly derailed by having a child). Parts of the compiler with more extensive changes will get more "coverage".

Let me again point out that all of the code is on Github. Specifically the state of the code when writing this can be found at tag "step-20c".

Furthermore, I'd like to extend an invitation to anyone who's interested in contributing. Go check out the project from Github, fork it if you like, and send me pull requests when you have something you'd like me to consider for the main tree, or just let me know if it's ok for me to pull things in whenever I see something interesting. There's now two of us - Christopher Bertels started contributing a while back, and have added lots of rdoc documentation and a range of other improvements, such as part of the instance variable support.

We've so far decided to go with the same license as Matz' version of Ruby, but I'm open to discussion about that. Specifically I would prefer the core library to be licensed under terms sufficiently loose to allow closed source apps to be compiled as well.

Anyway, lets see what things look like now.

The Parser

If you've followed my blog, you'll probably have seen the announcement that the compiler can now parse itself. I'm sure it still has bugs (it certainly did when I posted the announcement, as I've found out since), and it most certainly can't compile the AST it generates, but it's still a fairly big milestone. It also means that it can parse a small but relatively central subset of Ruby (there are many, many gaps).

The parser is split in three components:

• The low level s-expression style parser. This part has hardly changed.
• The operator precedence parser used for expressions. This has changed a lot, and needs a cleanup, but I'll attempt a description of the current state
• The "high level" parser used for control structures etc.. This is a simple recursive descent parser. It also would benefit from a cleanup, but it's not hard to understand (I think).

First of all, let us take a look at something else: Test cases. Parsing Ruby is nasty. As much as I love to program in Ruby, the grammar makes me feel downright dirty. It is full of context sensitive parts, exceptions and weird rules that make it painful to write a small and readable parser for it. All the more reason to write extensive sets of test cases.

Testing the parser components

I've been using Cucumber to add test cases, mainly because so far for the parser the test cases are very repetitive "here's the input, it's meant to generate this tree" kind of tests, and Cucumber makes that look nice and readable:

Feature: Shunting Yard
    In order to parse expressions, the compiler uses a parser component that uses the shunting yard
    algorithm to parse expressions based on a table.
    Scenario Outline: Basic expressions
        Given the expression expr
        When I parse it with the shunting yard parser
        Then the parse tree should become tree
    Examples:
      | expr                 | tree                                 |
      | "__FILE__"           | :__FILE__                            |
      | "1 + 2"              | [:add,1,2]                           |
      | "1 - 2"              | [:sub,1,2]                           |
      | "1 + 2 * 3"          | [:add,1,[:mul,2,3]]                  |
      | "1 * 2 + 3"          | [:add,[:mul,1,2],3]                  |
      | "(1+2)*3"            | [:mul,[:add,1,2],3]                  |
      | "1 , 2"              | [:comma,1,2]                         |
      | "a << b"             | [:shiftleft,:a,:b]                   |
      | "1 .. 2"             | [:range,1,2]                         |
      | "a = 1 or foo + bar" | [:or,[:assign,:a,1],[:add,:foo,:bar]]|
      | "foo and !bar"       | [:and,:foo,[:not,:bar]]              |
      | "return 1"           | [:return,1]                          |
      | "return"             | [:return]                            |
      | "5"                  | 5                                    |
      | "?A"                 | 65                                   |
      | "foo +\nbar"         | [:add,:foo,:bar]                     |
      | ":sym"               | :":sym"                              |
      | ":[]"                | :":[]"                               |

As of writing, the parser components have 106 scenarios (each entry in the example tables counts as one scenario) including a few failing ones. Whenever we find anything broken, a new test case goes in. 106 scenarios is nowhere near complete, but it helps tremendously with debugging, particularly with the operator precedence parser, as it's been fairly tedious to adjust and adapt it to handle the peculiarities of Ruby. It also serves as documentation of sorts of what the parser is expected to deliver

The operator precedence parser

We've covered this component before of sorts (go revisit it if you're unsure about it), but it's grown significantly in complexity since, mostly to account for weirdness in the Ruby grammar, some to account for missing functionality.  A word of warning before we start: It's gotten messy, and it needs to be cleaned up and re-factored. But it's not that hard to figure out.

I'm going to assume you're familiar with the previous parts, and have a rough idea of Dijkstra's Shunting Yard algorithm which this parser component is based on. We'll examine it top-down the way it's being used:

  def self.parser(scanner, parser)
     ShuntingYard.new(TreeOutput.new,Tokens::Tokenizer.new(scanner), parser)
  end

We start by instatiating the parser and passing  the most frequently used components to it. By passing an alternative to TreeOutput you an turn the output into reverse polish notation or anything you like. But we want a parse tree. Tokens::Tokenizer is used to retrieve a stream of tokens instead of working on individual characters. Last but not least we're passing it a reference to the recursive descent parser. Yuck. We do this because of Ruby's block syntax, which because of the way blocks can look like literal hashes and/or can be chained and used as part of an expression means we need to be able to call bak out of the shunting yard parser. 
It might be that it'd be just as well to combine the two, but I don't like tight coupling and I'm still living in hope of getting the time to figure out a way to reduce the coupling between these two components, and make the shunting yard parser generic enough to be reusable. One of the promises of an operator precedence parser is to be configured with a simple table of operators, and it's possible more of the exceptions in this current model can be handled by adding a few flags.

On to the next bit:

    def parse(inhibit=[])
      out = @out.dup
      out.reset
      tmp = self.class.new(out, @tokenizer,@parser)
      res = tmp.shunt(@tokenizer,[],inhibit)
      res ? res.result : nil
    end

A couple of oddities here. I've introduced an argument to allow specifying a set of tokens to inhibit and terminate the expression. This is needed because of peculiarities in how Ruby handle commas. Some places it's ok as it separates function arguments or array elements, but you also need to be able to put expressions  IN argument lists as default assignments, and there commas are not allowed without parantheses, as they're needed to separate arguments, and the argument list itself is parsed by the recursive descent parser. It would be possible to change this, but I'm not sure I want to try to make the argument list be parsed by the same component until I'm more sure of the consequences. Besides the current arrangement works.
You can also see we do some annoying initialization - copying and resetting the tree output object. This is done because the parser recursively calls itself, and the state of the output tree builder need to be clean when it gets called for a subtree in parantheses for example.

The next bit is in a fairly shameful state at the moment, but rather than wait until it's cleaned up I'd rather show you the intermediate state, and we'll revisit again later once I have it all figured out - the shunting parser probably deserve it's own follow up article as it can get a bit hard to follow.

Leading up to the main loop, which I'll break up in several chunks:

    def shunt(src, ostack = [], inhibit = [])
      possible_func = false     # was the last token a possible function name?
      opstate = :prefix         # IF we get a single arity operator right now, it is a prefix operator
                                # "opstate" is used to handle things like pre-increment and post-increment that
                                # share the same token.
      lp_on_entry = ostack.first && ostack.first.type == :lp
      opcall  = Operators["#call#"]
      opcallm = Operators["."]
      lastlp = true

The commented local vars are hopefully reasonably understandable. "lp_on_entry" is set to true if the method is passed an :lp operator in - that means '(','[', '{' etc.. We'll see how that's used later.

opcall and opcallm are just convenience shortcuts, though the hardcoded references to Operators[] are ugly (we'll meet more of them, and they'll go as soon as I find a clean way of decoupling the logic in this method).

"lastlp" is set to indicate whether or not the last token was an :lp type operator.

      src.each do |token,op|
        if inhibit.include?(token)
          src.unget(token)
          break
        end

Ok, so this is the start of the main loop. We get the token as a string in in "token", and if it's an operator we get the operator object in "op". We check if the token is member of a set of "inhibited" tokens that we don't allow to be part of an expression. This is used to handle cases where the recursive descent parser wants an expression that stops on encountering something that is normally a legal part of the operator. We'll see it used when we look at the recursive descent parser.

        if op
          op = op[opstate] if op.is_a?(Hash)

We then start handling operator tokens - most of the loop is split between handling operators and handling non-operator tokens, with very little shared logic. In some cases there will be two operators that share the same token. Currently we handle :infix_or_postfix vs. :prefix operators, and the only case it's currently used for is "*" as multiplication operator vs. as the "splat" operator (which expands arrays).

          # This makes me feel dirty, but it reflects the grammar:
          # - Inside a literal hash, or function call arguments "," outside of any type of parentheses binds looser than a function call,
          #   while outside of it, it binds tighter... Yay for context sensitive precedence rules.
          # This whole module needs a cleanup
          op = Operators["#,#"] if op == Operators[","] and lp_on_entry

The comment above speaks for itself, no? And we see a use for lp_on_entry to help decide the precedence rule to use for the comma, by switching objects around (Note that this also shows an anti-pattern that needs to be fixed: When you have hashes, try to avoid string keys. Strings are expensive objects where symbols get mapped to an integer - for things like this using symbols as keys tends to be more efficient).

          if op.sym == :hash_or_block || op.sym == :block
            if possible_func || ostack.last == opcall || ostack.last == opcallm
              @out.value([]) if ostack.last != opcall
              @out.value(parse_block(token))
              @out.oper(Operators["#flatten#"])
              ostack << opcall if ostack.last != opcall
            elsif op.sym == :hash_or_block
              op = Operators["#hash#"]
              shunt(src, [op])
              opstate = :infix_or_postfix
            else
              raise "Block not allowed here"
            end

The whole block above gets executed if the current operator is a '{' (:hash_or_block) or :block ("do"), and it's one of the hairy bits... If we've seen what is possibly the start of a block (possibly, because '{' could also start a hash, hence the symbol), we first check if we're possibly looking at a function call (a pre-requisite for a block) based on the previous token, OR if the last operator to have been pushed on the operator stack is the function or method call operators (note: We currently still differentiate between function and method calls, though that is not a distinction Ruby makes; it is helpful for some aspects of the parser, and it is helpful for the low level s-expression syntax, but this distinction will normally become hidden from the "end-user"). 

If there's a function call being handled, then we know we're dealing with a block. We output an empty argument array if needed, and then call back up into the recursive descent parser via "parse_block" (token is passed so that the parser can determine what symbol the block should end on - '}' vs. 'end'). The "fake" operator "#flatten#" is output to aid in the tree building as the tree builder doesn't directly handle cases where a node has more than two children/arguments. This is a bit of a hack, and there is actually no real reason why a shunting yard parser can't be adapted to directly handle operators that are prefixes to multiple operands, so that may be part of the cleanup later. 

If we're NOT dealing with a function call, we check if we're looking at the :hash_or_block ('{') operator, and if so we know we're now dealing with a Hash, and we recursively call shunt to handle the interior of the Hash.

          else
            if op.type == :rp
              @out.value(nil) if lastlp
              @out.value(nil) if src.lasttoken and src.lasttoken[1] == Operators[","]
              src.unget(token) if !lp_on_entry
            end

If we are not dealing with a potential block, we move on. First, above, we check for a :rp (right parenthesis, bracket or brace) operator. We "fake" a value if we've just seen an empty pair of parentheses, so we don't have to deal with operand-less operators elsewhere. We also fake value if the last token was a comma operator. This is to handle the convenience case in Ruby where arrays or hashes can have a "dangling" comma at the end like so: [1,2,3,] (useful for symmetry and machine generating Ruby source.

            reduce(ostack, op)

We call reduce in order to fore output of any tighter binding operators. In the case of, say, 1 * 2 + 3, (* 1 2) will get output when encountering '+'.

            if op.type == :lp
              shunt(src, [op])
              opstate = :infix_or_postfix
              # Handling function calls and a[1] vs [1]
              ostack << (op.sym == :array ? Operators["#index#"] : opcall) if possible_func

If it's an lp type operator, we do as we did for Hash ('{'), except we also want to selectively output "#index#" or the "#call#" operators if we're dealing with a function call. This occurs when we have an expression like "foo(1)", in which case "possible_func" will be true after "foo" has been encountered, and we then parse "(1)" and pass the result onto the output handler, and then output the "#call#" operator to tie "foo" and it's arguments together. As the slightly misleading comment says, "#index#" is used if we see '[...]' after something that might indicate a function call, as we need to differentiate a[1] (a call to the method "[]" on the object reference held in "a") vs [1] (constructing an Array object).

            elsif op.type == :rp
              break

If we dealt with an :rp we want to exit from the loop.

            else
              opstate = :prefix
              ostack << op
            end
          end

... if not we just push the operator on the operator stack.

        else
          if possible_func
            reduce(ostack)
            ostack << opcall
          end
          @out.value(token)
          opstate = :infix_or_postfix # After a non-operator value, any single arity operator would be either postfix,
                                      # so when seeing the next operator we will assume it is either infix or postfix.
        end
        possible_func = op ? op.type == :lp :  !token.is_a?(Numeric)
        lastlp = false
        src.ws if lp_on_entry
      end

Ok, time to handle non-operator values. Not much to say about this - it's hopefully reasonably understandable. The last line about will skip whitespace including line feeds if we're inside a parenthesized sub-expression, while normally (inside the tokenizer) we only skip whitespace excluding linefeeds. This is because the general rule in Ruby is to allow linefeeds anywhere where it doesn't create an ambiguity. I'm sure there are more special cases we'll need to handle, but for now this approximates the rule closely enough.

      if opstate == :prefix && ostack.size && ostack.last && ostack.last.type == :prefix
        # This is an error unless the top of the @ostack has minarity == 0,
        # which means it's ok for it to be provided with no argument
        if ostack.last.minarity == 0
          @out.value(nil)
        else
          raise "Missing value for prefix operator #{ostack[-1].sym.to_s}"
        end
      end
      reduce(ostack)
      return @out if ostack.empty?
      raise "Syntax error. #{ostack.inspect}"
    end

This is the last part we'll look at (for the "reduce" method, see the earlier post), and it's outside the look. It's down to handling errors and optional operands, and then reducing the operator stack completely before returning the output handler (which should at this point hopefully contain a complete expression).

The recursive descent parser

The operator precedence parser was the hard part of parsing. There's not really all that much to say about the changes to the recursive descent parser - it's all really formulaic, so I'll pick one of the larger functions and walk through that:

  def parse_block(start = nil)
    pos = position
    return nil if start == nil and !(start = expect("{")  || expect("do"))
    close = (start.to_s == "{") ? "}" : "end"
    ws
    args = []
    if expect("|")
       ws
      begin
        ws
        if name = parse_name
          args << name
          ws
        end
      end while name and expect(",")
      ws
      expect("|")
    end
    exps = parse_block_exps
    ws
    expect(close) or expected("'#{close.to_s}' for '#{start.to_s}'-block")
    return E[pos,:block] if args.size == 0 and !exps[1] || exps[1].size == 0
    E[pos,:block, args, exps[1]]
  end

This is what the shunting yard parser calls back into. Most of this should be fairly understandable assuming you remember that "expect" tries to match a string, and "ws" skips past whitespace. 
The major new thing here is "position" and that "E[]" stuff. "position" is a method that returns what the scanner thinks is the current position. It isn't guaranteed to be 100% accurate all the time as the scanner doesn't itself keep track of the length of lines it has scanned past, so it depends on the token being "unget" to contain a postition for that (see scanner.rb - not going in depth into that). 

In reality it works well enough to give reasonable error reporting during parsing. But what about errors identified in later stages?

That's where E[] comes in. It's a shortcut to create an instance of a subclass of Array: AST::Expr. We'll be using this class to carry additional annotation of the nodes in the parse tree in later stages. For now the additional element is the position, which it takes from the first argument that either is a position or has one. See ast.rb for the details. 

Compiling the syntax tree

The compiler class itself hasn't changed all that much since last time apart from much better error reporting (see error()). The most significant worthwhile change to look at is the implementation of basic support for instance variables in objects. As for vtables for classes we're taking major shortcuts to start with.

The magic starts in "scope.rb".  Specifically we now keep an array of instance variables we've seen for this current class. This chunk in Scope#get_arg will return [:ivar, offset] where "offset" is the number of the "slot" of PTR_SIZE values starting from the beginning of an instance object that this instance variable belongs to.

    # instance variables.
    # if it starts with a single "@", it's a instance variable.
    if a.to_s[0] == ?@ or @instance_vars.include?(a)
      offset = @instance_vars.index(a)
      add_ivar(a) if !offset
      offset = @instance_vars.index(a)
      return [:ivar, offset]
    end

At the moment the above contains a bug, as the instance variables will actually get added too late for the "new" method to correctly allocate the object of the right size. So in the next batch of changes will be one to "visit" the nodes of a class definition to pre-allocate the instance variable offsets.
This current approach also has another problem: In Ruby you can dynamically add instance variables to an object. There's no guarantee that all (or any) of the instance variables identified will actually be added to any specific instance. Here the compiler will need to make a trade-off:

We can allocate space for all the instance variables we see (we still need a way to handle dynamically allocated ones) or we can pick a subset that is likely to be present on most objects (if it's set in "initialiaze" for example). For dynamically allocated ones we can set aside space for pointers to a hash table to hold them. We can also use a level of indirection to "pack" the instance variables more to avoid having to resort to the hash tables as often as we otherwise might do. There's no guarantee any specific one of these strategies will be best for exactly your app, so there's room for switches here, or have the system dynamically optimize the choices at runtime (at the cost of more complexity). For now, though, we'll just allocate sufficient space for everything we see, and ignore dynamically allocated ones. Then later, we'll add support for handling dynamically allocated ones, and then we can start looking at optimizations. As usual we take the shortcut that bring us functionality first.

The compilation of the instance variables is pretty trivial - load and saves happens in compiler.rb, in compile_assign and compile_eval_arg respectively. Here's what we do in compile_assign:

    if atype == :ivar
      ret = compile_eval_arg(scope,:self)
      @e.save_to_instance_var(source, ret, aparam)
      return [:subexpr]
    end

Emitter#save_to_instance_var just stores the value to the appropriate offset into the object.

The support libraries

We've barely started on the support libraries, so this will be short, but it's worth taking a brief look at what's in the main tree so far, not least because it demonstrates how I intend to proceed - even core elements of the object model, such as the Object and Class classes will largely be written in Ruby, and make use of only very limited bootstrapping help from the compiler. Only a small number of elements will require us to "dip out" of pure Ruby, and in those cases we'll as much as possible rely on the s-expression syntax that allow direct access to the AST. Doing C etc. is a last resort or temporary workaround only - a goal of this project is minimal dependencies.

Here's what we use to bootstrap Class:

def __new_class_object(size)
  ob = malloc(size)
  %s(assign (index ob 0) Class)
  ob
end
class Class
  def new
    # @instance_size is generated by the compiler. YES, it is meant to be                                              
    # an instance var, not a class var                                                                                 
    ob = malloc(@instance_size*4)
    %s(assign (index ob 0) self)
    ob
  end
end

Calls to __new_class_object is called by the bootstrap code generated by the compiler (in compile_class). It just uses the C-library's malloc() for now, and assigns a pointer to the class Class in the first slot.
Class#new is implemented so that it will take the instance size from each subclass (that's why we use an instance variable of the class instead of a class variable - class variables are shared across subtrees of the inheritance tree in Ruby), and then does more or less what __new_class_object does.

It's worth noting that we make this raw class reference available as the instance variable @__class__ in the objects. Why not as "class"? Well, the Ruby object model is finicky. Modules and meta-classes are inserted into the inheritance chain (for good reason - it makes things a lot easier), but the are "hidden" from you when you access self.class. So @__class__ is an implementation detail that should not be dependent on other than to help us implement the core classes. The same is true for "@instance_size" in class Class.

Final words (for now)

As usual, if you have questions or comments, they are welcome. Get all of the code from Github. The state of the code when writing this can be found at tag "step-20c".

And feel free to get in touch to contribute, or just fork the code and hack away.

There's already a ton of changes since I started writing this part. The next milestone is to get the compiler to compile itself - that's probably 2-3 articles away. The first step will be to get it to generate code that will link, but I fully expect it to have plenty of problems that will prevent it from running... An article on debugging the code generation is likely to be forthcoming at that stage...
Once it can compile itself, my next goal is to work on getting it to compile mspec, in order to get a measure of what is missing from Ruby. It will require quite a few fixes to the parser.

Compiler technology is one of my hobbies, most recently satisfied with my project to write a series of post of how to write a (Ruby) compiler in Ruby. Since I really like Ruby, it's natural that I've done a fair amount of thinking about compiling Ruby, and what the problems with that are, and I decided it was time I wrote some of them down along with some thoughts on how they can be solved -- ideally without changing Ruby. Even more so since I decided I DO want to take the leap towards making my compiler project focus on actually compiling Ruby, and not just something somewhat like Ruby. 
All of the issues here affect a traditional "ahead of time" compiler - one that takes source in and spits out a binary, but many also affects JIT's.

I'll start with the problems, in no particular order:

Problem #1: No delineation of compile time and runtime

Many scripting languages fall in this category, but Ruby does it one better, by making the class definitions executable. Where a compiler for a language like C++ can do a lot of work to analyze and optimize code at compile time, and can build most structures related to classes at compile time, in Ruby it may in some cases be hard to avoid executing code at runtime to determine what the class will look like.

A potential Ruby compiler also needs to solve the issue of what files are compiled once at compile time and linked into the application, and what files are evaluated (and possibly JIT compiled) at runtime. This is a possibly tricky tradeoff - reloading code has become a common solution for Ruby web applications to avoid shutdown and restarts, for example, but there are no formal hints in Ruby code that tells the application what may or may not be attempted reloaded later. 

Reloading in Ruby tends to depend on the ability of the Ruby object model to replace classes and methods, so the most natural solution for handling reloading may simply be to compile the classes in statically but retain this ability. That still doesn't solve the first part of the problem, though: If my app starts with "require 'foo'", do I expect "foo" to be loaded when compiling or each time? You probably wouldn't be surprised if the compiler loaded it once. But what if it starts with code that reads the contents of a directory, and require's each file in turn? That one is trickier - some scripts may use that method as a crude "plugin" mechanism, for example.


My compiler project has reached the point where dealing with something supposedly simple like "require" is now actually a stumbling block. Even something "simple" like Mspec from Rubyspec actually depends on Ruby code being executed to determine what files to require, and I have to decide whether to for now use "hacks" to get around it (Mspec and a lot of other Ruby code use a small set of common idiomatic ways of modifying the load path for the code being required - a tiny interpreter subset could take care of the basic cases) or do it "properly" (compiling to shared objects and use dynamic loading at runtime, but this kills a lot of optimizations; or JIT compilation of files that get required this way; or even JIT compilation as a means of executing the code to determine the files to require and then requiring them statically). Or I could just skip the problem for now, and just handle the specific case where files are required using a static string and/or add a hack that will use a substitution table or regexp to rewrite the require's (eww...)

Anyway, the point is that this is a big hurdle for anyone hoping to write an ahead of time compiler for Ruby without resorting to JIT compiling most of the program anyway. Part of the appeal of ahead of time compilation is to avoid JIT compilation (and avoid lugging around a ton of source files), so while supporting JIT compilation for pathological cases is good and/or necessary depending on how you look at it, for an ahead of time compiler to make sense you want to make that a "last resort" if there is no sensible alternative.

Problem #2: A very costly method dispatch

Let me count the number of ways Ruby makes method dispatch expensive in a naive implementation (see also my post on the Ruby Object Model as implemented in MRI)

1. A Ruby method call involves first identifying the class of an object. This either requires following the "class" pointer of an object, OR a "decoding scheme" (as used in MRI) to allow small objects like Fixnum, True, False, Symbol and Nil to be encoded without a pointer.
2. Then we must follow the "super" chain from class to class, potentially all the  way to Object, to determine which class can satisfy the method call. Then if that fails, it needs to do the same for #method_missing.
3. Because the type of the object stored in any variable is unknown, a compiler can not assume anything about the type of an object based on where it is stored. Unlike, say, C++, where the compiler will happily assume that a Foo * will hold a pointer to an object of class Foo or a subclass, and treat it accordingly, a Ruby compiler could not. This also largely affect inlining of methods as a viable optimization.
4. .. and anyway, since Ruby classes are open, users can add, alias and remove methods at will (with some minor restrictions), so a Ruby compiler largely can't assume a method stays the same through the lifetime of the object.
5. ... even worse, thanks to meta-classes in Ruby, there may conceptually be a new "almost" superclass inserted for an object.

Luckily, there are a number of solutions that can vastly improve on the naive implementation of Ruby method dispatch. Unfortunately most (though not all) of them make the compiler and runtime more complex.

Problem #3: Meta-programming

It's alluded to above. Ruby allows extensive modification of classes and even objects at runtime. Defining new methods, inserting new modules or otherwise messing with the structure makes static analysis to optimize other problematic aspects of compiling Ruby very hard. 

Take even something simple like integer arithmetic. Never mind that Ruby automatically handles overflow and turns Fixnum's into Bignum's, which means that even if you do try to make it cheaper than a method call, you first have to check whether you deal with a Fixnum (which is not an ordinary object) or a Bignum (which is an ordinary object), but if both values ARE Fixnum's you still face the uncertainty of whether or not a method of Fixnum has been replaced by unscrupulous monkey patchers...

Problem #4: No statically defined set of instance variables

In a language like C++, object size is kept down because the compiler knows at compile time what instance variables exist for any given object. As a result, it can pack them tightly together. In Ruby, theoretically an object can have new instance variables show up at any time, through mechanisms such as #instance_variable_set, #instance_eval etc.. MRI solved this by making the instance variables stored in a hash table, which is incredibly wasteful for otherwise small objects. Ruby 1.9 has reduced this impact somewhat by storing up to 3 instance variables in the object itself (see the Ruby1.9 section), and then falling back to an external structure.

Luckily, in practice most objects will have a small and mostly statically determinable instance variable set, and some of the same methods that can speed up method dispatch can be used to handle this more effectively as well.

Problem #5: Method visibility, default arguments and method arity

In C++ for example, you can easily know at compile time if a method is private or protected. In Ruby, since you don't know the class of the object you will be passed, you can't know that until runtime. This means this needs to be checked at runtime as well. We could imagine checking this only in private or protected methods, since use of them is relatively rare in Ruby code, but that's not easy either: 

Private methods in Ruby require self as an explicit receiver, which means they are only allowed to be called from within a method, and on the same object as the method is operating on. Slight little problem... How will the executed method know that this is the case? And then there's the ways of bypassing the check. An alternative for handling this is to pass along a flag saying "I promise I was called with self., honest!" (or used #__send__ etc. to bypass the check), but handling that without imposing overhead on calls that don't need it is non-trivial as well.

Default arguments, and more generally method arity, suffers from the same problem. In C++ the caller can take responsibility for initializing default arguments when not providing values for all of the arguments. In Ruby, the compiler won't know when you are calling a method that has default arguments vs. one that just have fewer arguments (for that matter, you don't know for sure if the number of arguments is right at all), and so this has to be handled by the callee. That means the callee needs to get an argument count, or have another method of determining how many arguments were passed. That's not to bad. 

But the callee then also have to contain the logic to initialize missing arguments. That's messier as it means either manipulating the stack frame, handling multiple ways of accessing an argument, making the arguments a "real" Ruby array and push the default arguments onto it, or otherwise moving arguments around to get them in a consistent location. There are simple ways of doing this (shove it all into a "real" Ruby Array object for example and convert the default argument initializers into the equivalent of ||= calls), and there are faster ways (keep things on the stack as much as possible, possible mess with the stack frame, and only convert to a Ruby Array object for methods where it's actually treated as one).

Solutions

Below are some of my thoughts on how to address the bigger ones of these problems.

Solution #1: Speeding up method dispatch with a multilevel approach to dispatch

In "Protocol Extension: A Technique for Structuring Large Extensible Software Systems" (1994; original Postscript file; PDF from Citeseer X), Michael Franz, presents a method for "protocol extension" in Oberon - a way of relatively effectively adding methods at runtime. The basic idea is that method changes (addition, overriding or removal) are rare, and method dispatch is frequent, so it makes sense to do more work when modifying the methods than it does when calling them. 

Franz suggested that the "vtable" for each subclass is made to contain pointers to all the methods for the entire hierarchy. A method that is overridden in a subclass has its method pointer overwritten in that subclass and all descendants of that subclass that has not overridden it themselves.

The problem he noted is that in a big class hierarchy the vtables for each class may grow prohibitively large, while remaining mostly unchanged. This can be counteracted in a number of ways - one of them being splitting the vtable into chunks for "interfaces", and making each vtable a set of pointers to vtables for interfaces.

Another way is this:

The compiler (or compiler-writer) can make educated guesses about which methods are most likely to exist in all classes, and which methods are less likely to get called:

• Methods in classes high up in the hierarchy are more likely to remain present. In Ruby methods on Object will exist in almost all classes (the only exception will be cases where the methods have been explicitly removed or aliased away).
• Methods that are referenced in inner loops may be more important to make fast to call than others.
• Analysis of number of call-sites can also give an indication of how frequent a method will be called.

Methods that are present in more than a certain threshold of classes, or that are judged to be particularly performance sensitive can be allocated an offset in a per-class vtable. Methods that are slightly less likely can be grouped into "interfaces", and require a one level indirection. As a last resort the implementation can be forced to fall back on a #send call that does lookups the way MRI does now. But see solution #2

Solution #2: Polymorphic Inline Caches

Otherwise expensive method lookups can be cached. This caching can even be done "inline" in he code path by dynamically inlining the code for the classes that are seen at a call site in practice. Polymorphic inline caches were introduced in Optimizing Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Programming Languages with Polymorphic Inline Caches" by Urs Hlzle, Craig Chambers, and David Ungar.

This does not remove the problem of potentially expensive lookups, but it drastically reduces the impact in cases where the type used is relatively stable (which in practice is the common case - the same variable is rarely assigned more than a handful different types).

The key to PIC for languages like Ruby is that you still need to check the type, and you either need to invalidate the old type when a class is modified, or you need to invalidate the caches. Maintaining that logic can be complicated (compare to the approach in solution #1, where all that is required is updating the vtables). PIC's can be combined with the approach above: Solution #1 provides cheap lookups, but #2 can still allow inlining of whole methods where appropriate, in a way that is safe.

Solution #3: Trace Trees

Dr. Michael Franz and Andreas Gal have been working on a technique called Trace Trees. Possibly the best introduction is in a blog post by Andreas Gal, but the papers are also fairly accessible.

Trace trees is the "hot new thing" - you'll find it used in the new JS JIT for Mozilla for example ("Tracemonkey"). The short description is that trace trees consists of tracking the execution of bits of an application - typically in a bytecode interpreter, and when a certain part is executed often enough, you "trace" the code execution  and create a "tree" of code fragments. You use this to identify loops or frequently executed code paths that are optimized (in the bytecode interpreter case, this would involve JIT compilation), and protected by a "guard" that verify whether to keep executing the new native generated code path.

While the approach is intended  for a bytecode interpreter, it has scope for being used to handle dynamic runtime optimization and inlining of specific code paths generated by an "ahead of time" compiler as well. The compiler can generate the best code it can, but inject timing and tracing code where appropriate to allow it to use information gathered at runtime to inline specific method calls into inner loops etc.. An in-between alternative is to let the AOT compiler use profiling data gathered from past runs to built trees on subsequent compiles (this approach is also suggested in the papers on polymorphic inline caches)

Solution #4: Dynamic object packing (for instance variables)

We've already explored the building blocks for handling the troublesome issue of dynamic instance variables above. There are two parts to that problem: Quick access, which is hindered by having to resort to schemes that requires expensive instance variable lookups, and space which is hindered by a potentially dynamically changing set of instance variables.

First of all it is possible to apply a similar analysis to that suggested for vtables: Identify the most likely set of instance variables for objects of a class. Assign specific offsets for those instance variables, and compile code using static offsets for code internal to the class.

For instance variables that are not guaranteed to be ever used, there's a value judgement: If information is available to determine a rough likelihood you can use a cutoff to decide which to always include in the object. This has the potential for huge space overhead if the guess is wrong. The alternative is to fall back on a hash table referenced from the object to handle additional instance variables. This is costly in space and time if the number of objects with extra instance variables is high.

However the latter method can be combined with the earlier solutions to reduce the time overhead.

To reduce space usage further, we can dynamically pack the object: 

We can potentially cooperate with the garbage collector to identify pointers to an object, and then reallocate the object elsewhere and change the layout, and then use tracing similar to the one mentioned above to created optimized code paths that rely on the new static layout. If we don't want to move all objects, we can handle this by inserting "proxy classes" and making specific subsets of these objects instances of specific proxy classes. In fact, Ruby already sort-of does this by inserting proxies for Module's that are "hidden" for normal Ruby code when walking the inheritance chain.

This is a fairly complex solution, but one that can potentially allow very tight packing of objects, and avoiding a significant percentage of hash table lookups for instance variables. Combined with trace trees and PIC's, a significant part of the code overhead for method accessors used from outside the class can also be removed.

Yeah, I know, it's a long time since the last part. That doesn't mean things have stopped, though I've been extremely busy.
As always, if you don't know what I'm talking about, take a look at the series.

To see what I've been up to, take a look at the Github repository

I'm not going to write a full part right now, but rest assured more is coming soon. Apart from being busy, a major reason I've held off is that I've been working towards this milestone:

The parser can now parse all of the *.rb files that make up the compiler itself. 
Note that this does NOT mean that it can compile itself, but it can parse itself into an AST. I'll cover some of the work needed to get there in the next part, and then I'll start working on extending it so it can compile larger and larger parts of itself. I'll break it into chunks as that is a fairly substantial amount of work (it will need a lot of runtime support such as partial implementations of Array, Hash, String, IO etc.)

Now, if you look at the commits, and think about the implications of the above I'm assuming you have a nagging suspicion that I'm moving towards actually writing a Ruby compiler (as in a compiler that compiles Ruby)...

All I'll say is that I am considering it. There are a lot of problems to compiling Ruby, many of which I'm going to address in a separate post, but let me leave you with an example to ponder... How do you handle this admittedly contrived (and untested) code sensibly in a compiler:

foo =  `wget some-url`
foo.each { |line| require line.chomp }
class Bar
   puts  "I'm inside Bar"
end

The point is that Ruby has no real distinction between "load time" and runtime, and so any Ruby compiler has to make a lot of tradeoffs (in other areas as well): Do you satisfy require's at compile time or at runtime? Do you execute any code at compile time (some Ruby code manipulate the load path for example, or do weird things to decide what to require, though likely not as bizarre as the example above). Do you execute code in class definitions or generate code to build the classes at runtime?
Some decisions are likely to hurt compatibility; some are likely to require significant tradeoffs between performance and compatibility.

So while I'm heading in the direction of "sort of" compiling Ruby, I've not yet decided how much importance I'll put on completeness and compatibility with arbitrary Ruby code vs. creating a compiler that does things the way I think makes most sense (if you look at the parser, you'll for example start seeing how beastly the Ruby grammar an be, though I hope to be able to clean up the parser quite a bit again once I get a bit further).

Why compile Ruby at all, subset or not, you might ask?

I have a few reasons:

• Distributing a single binary is practical at times (this indicates at least giving the option of satisfying require's at compile time)   
• NOT having to distribute a whole runtime environment of an interpreter/vm and libraries can make things a lot easier.  
• Startup time - It's hard to beat a static binary that only requires relocation for startup time; I've had external Ruby libraries add seconds to startup time for fairly simple apps because of lots of dependencies...  
• A single binary is a simple way of guaranteeing that the libraries the app was tested with are the ones that actually get used on the client system.  

That doesn't mean I don't think there's plenty of space for VM's/interpreters - there's a lot to be said for the simplicity and flexibility of it. But a compiler allows a language to go a lot of places depending on a VM is unlikely to.

More importantly, I very strongly believe in the value of self-hosted systems. A compiler Ruby or a substantial subset of Ruby with proper support for interfacing with the host platform also allows Ruby VM's or interpreters to be written in (nearly) Ruby.. When I like a language I don't like having to dip down into another language to improve its implementation. 


That said, I also have this urge to have a platform for experimenting with improvements to Ruby, and some of my focus going forwards will be on making the compiler easy to extend